A Decentralized National Conversation: The Curriculum Project Report

I was invited to come back to my old school and give a talk for an afternoon. I was asked to meet with the theater department’s chair about what I was doing. Now he was a guy who, when I was here, although I was a very active theater major, I wasn’t doing the stuff he cared about, which was the musicals and the big plays. He was very, very committed to the old world of teaching theater. I described what I was doing, and he said to me, “This is [name of institution]. Your little fads, your trends, your sort of social stuff, things come and go, but this is [name of institution]. This is the place where we have always been and always will be committed to the traditions of what is really important in our field — acting, directing, design. These other things will happen here and there, but I can’t have you back here to teach a trend, which doesn’t have a place here.” And right now, I’m actually sitting in his old office.

Quote from an interview in “The Curriculum Project Report: Culture and Community Development in Higher Education.” Download from http://www.curriculumproject.net/report.html.

About a year and a half ago, my old friend Dudley Cocke from Roadside Theater asked if I’d be interested in helping to shine a light on the current state and future potentials of higher education for practitioners of community cultural development (CCD): the community artists and organizers whose work is with people who want to understand and bring out the mobilizing potential of their own cultures and communities. Having spent much of the time since November, 2006 (when my book “New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development” was published), on college campuses giving talks and workshops, I didn’t have to think long before saying yes. I’d encountered a passionate interest in devising the best possible education for community artists. I also heard a tremendous number of war stories from educators who’d run up against barriers as they attempted to transplant and cultivate vibrant CCD practice in academic soil.

Dudley and Jan Cohen-Cruz had already been having this conversation, having worked together on several projects that brought students from NYU (where Jan then taught) into Dudley’s home territory at Appalshop and into collaboration with several New Orleans-based universities in the post-Katrina period. Each of our perspectives was different, but we agreed that with the evident upsurge of CCD in higher education, with more courses and programs being added every semester, this was an opportune time to engage our colleagues in thinking about the big questions: How should community artists be educated? How near were existing programs to that ideal? And if the gap we perceived was borne out by research, what would help to close it? We also agreed, based on an aggregate century or so of involvement, that effective CCD education had to maintain a balance of skills training, community engagement and scholarship, and that all three legs of that triangle were anchored by commitment to social change, expressed in a description of the goal we borrowed from Reverend James Lawson, “a social order of justice permeated by love.”

Within a few months of conceiving the project, just as we were searching for a sponsor, Jan became the director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life<http://www.imaginingamerica.org>, and we agreed to bring The Curriculum Project under IA’s umbrella, securing support from the Nathan Cummings Foundation, where this work was seen as a continuation of the projects Jan and Dudley had earlier carried out with Cummings support. Every once in a while, the stars line up for something worthwhile to happen quickly. Within a short time, we’d added three stellar advisors: Ludovic Blain, an experienced organizer and public-policy wonk (he’s currently running the Web site Stop Dogwhistle Racism); Jamie Haft, a recent NYU graduate with a passionate interest in CCD (she’s currently program coordinator at Imagining America); and Sonia BasSheva Mañjon, who’d pioneered the B.F.A. in Community Arts at California College of the Arts in Oakland (she’s currently vice president for diversity and strategic partnerships at Wesleyan University). During the first half of 2008, we conducted confidential interviews with 28 individuals who were deeply involved in (or deeply concerned about) the education of community artists, and we surveyed 231 other practitioners, educators, funders, consultants, community partners and students.

Our report includes figures and diagrams, to be sure, but they tell far less of the story than the words of the interviewees and survey respondents who took part in this extended, decentralized conversation. As with all complex subjects — all forms of work that call on the heart, the head, the body and spirit — measurable facts are only a small part of the story. Reading the report will give you a strong sense of the integrity, creative purpose and healing intentions of the individuals who make up this field. When the Curriculum Project team sat down to talk about what we had learned at the end of the research phase, having amassed a great quantity of thoughtful observation, the thing that most impressed everyone was the keen thirst to talk about this important work, the burning passion to create something in higher education that shines with all the intensity of CCD work at its best.

For instance, people who aren’t deeply familiar with this work often believe it is necessary to choose between artistic excellence and effective commitment to community participation, but over and over again, interviewees saw the two as equal and inseparable:

Any of the major kind of veteran practitioners that we look up to will say you have to be an artist. You know, Joe Shmo can’t do that effectively, you have to be an artist, and you have to know how to make art. And the other thing about most training programs is, they don’t teach you how to make art. I mean even at [my university drama department], almost everyone was just telling you how to follow directions as an actor, and maybe how to be creative within your own realm as an actor in relation to a playwright and a director, but not really how to make art from scratch, which is what community-based artists have to do. When I say there has to be regular technique training, it also requires the redefinition of what techniques we’re talking about. You have to have some basic skills in your art form, but you also need to know how to create work and you need to know how to collaborate, all of those are part of the techniques of a community-based artist. And that’s different from theory and history and policy and those other things that can happen in a regular classroom or studio room.

Despite boundless hopes and keen determination, the majority of participants in our research ranked the overall quality of higher education for CCD no better than “fair.” The question that most concerned them was whether this complex and relational practice can be taught effectively in existing institutional environments:

I’m frankly an agnostic about does this really belong in the colleges and universities. I’m not absolutely convinced of it. I worry that it can be academicized and denatured. I’m deeply worried about kids investing a lot of time and money in school to go out into a job market that doesn’t place much value on this kind of work, and it’s a hard life. There are obviously a few folks who figured out strategies to make it work for them in the country over long periods of time, but I dare say that there’s an awful lot more who haven’t, and for whom it became a burnout or a sort of sad chapter in their lives. And it’s such joyous work to do when it’s done well. I find it so sad that so much of it is tainted by the dead hand of the bureaucracies that dole out the money or the dead hand of the bureaucracies that engineer the programs so that they are so much less than the artists could make them.

What’s more, over 40% of the educators who took part responded to our question about the overall state of the field by saying they didn’t know enough to judge. This clearly points to the need for more interaction, dialogue, support for visits and exchanges — for all the things that enable people who should be colleagues and collaborators to know each other and draw strength from each other in pursuing common aims.

Many issues were raised by project participants: whether institutional cultures on campus could yield to CCD’s commitment to pluralism, participation and equity; whether multiple forms of knowledge, including those that don’t entail a Ph.D., could be recognized and employed; whether CCD theory, history and practice would be taught by people with appropriate experience and depth of knowledge; whether academic leaders would recognize CCD’s potential for the increasingly popular project of reinventing the university to address 21st-century conditions; whether the organic time of CCD practice could work within the dominant space and time structures of the university; and so on. The solutions they proposed mostly focused on exciting hybrids of on-campus and in-community education, grounded in equal and reciprocal partnerships between universities and community organizations — even as practitioners told us that past partnerships had seldom been reciprocal:

If you’re asking whether the relationship is equitable in terms of funding, no. We’ve always had to find our own funding; we’ve never been funded through higher ed. So let’s say, for example, the college students find using our facilities is wonderful, but we don’t get paid for it. They just use it, and we feel that that’s a service that we want to give because we want this information to get out. There is an informal relationship amongst us all [activists and professors]. I think they’ve learned a lot from our work and from communication with a lot of the international people. So they’re beginning to incorporate them into their programs and invite them. Or, for example, if we bring someone, they’ll invite them to [their campuses], so there is that relationship. But there isn’t a relationship where the university says, “Thank you for contributing, here’s a pot of money, or a
grant.” That doesn’t exist.

Despite the many obstacles and challenges described within its pages, I think you will come away from the report with a sense of optimism, as our team did, and as expressed by many participants, for instance:

I think it’s happening. How can we continue to have it happen, that it becomes an indispensable part of any serious program, that community development work has to be part of any serious theater program, because it is a vibrant way in which people are working in our field and it must be studied?

We concluded with ten recommendations. In a very real sense, the first two subsume all the others:

All parties should recognize that this is a period of action research, marked by experimentation in program design, curriculum and approach to every element of CCD education, and should engage in a spirit of true collaboration.

No one has a patent on the definitive CCD curriculum. Even the most promising programs have relatively short track records. With an open spirit of inquiry and support for field development, all can function as co-learners, benefiting from each other’s mistakes and successes. In its search for renewal in changing times, the university needs CCD’s commitments to pluralism, participation and equity, its creativity in the service of social justice. In the search for excellence in preparing young people to do the essential, exciting work of creating civil society, CCD needs the university’s commitment to rigor, reflection and open inquiry.

It is essential that the values shaping CCD practice also inform and influence education in the field.

This is a consistent through-line on almost every page of these findings: You can’t teach people how to enter into democratic dialogue through undemocratic means without canceling the deeper meaning of what you wish to impart; you can’t effectively transmit commitments to pluralism, participation and equity in programs shaped by institutional practices that are exclusionary or elitist; you can’t fully convey the skills of looking fearlessly and understanding deeply in a situation where inquiry is bounded by customs and prohibitions that have the effect of protecting privilege.

 Please download the 74-page report here to experience this decentralized national conversation, to learn what your colleagues have to say about higher education for community artists and to peruse a community cultural development glossary, a compendium of courses and programs and much, much more. You’ll also find suggestions for many things that can be done to advance higher education for CCD. Please let me know what you are planning: arlene@arlenegoldbard.com. Good luck!

Arlene Goldbard is a writer and consultant soon to be based in Kansas City, Missouri, whose focus is the intersection of culture, politics and spirituality. Her most recent book, “New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development,” was published by New Village Press in November 2006. Visit her Web site to read her blog and download talks and writings. Contact Jamie Haft at Imagining America at jmhaft@syr.edu.

Original CAN/API publication: November 2008